"He blew up a little old lady in a lift..."
John Entwistle on Keith Moon, Part 2: cherry bombs, waterbeds, jealousy, alcohol, drugs, surfing, acting, and the tragic death of Keith's chauffeur.
“There was a Keith Moon that was great until two in the morning, then he became a monster that you didn’t want to go near.”
Welcome to the second part, of three, of my mammoth John Entwistle interview, conducted at his Quarwood mansion in the English Cotswolds, back in the spring of 1996. As I detailed in the lengthy introduction to Part 1, this interview was relatively early in the process of conducting interviews and research for my Keith Moon biography, and I mention it again here primarily because, in this second section, I appear to be feeling my way around still, trying to connect John’s stories to those I had heard elsewhere, possibly with different dates and places. Of course, when you’ve spent 35 years in a band like The Who, as John had by this point, you’re not always going to get every aspect of every anecdote correct – assuming such a thing exists - but so many of the stories that John tells here are so rich with detail that you know, if nothing else, that he believes this is how they happened.
The frequent use of the f-word may just have been The Ox’s nature, or it may have been the steadily increasing amounts of Remy in his coffee. Ditto some of the comments, and I would certainly want to caveat here that John’s love for Keith clearly ran very, very deep. In fact I would conjecture that it’s only because it ran so deep that he was able to criticize Keith to the extent he does so. Regardless, I have edited out some of the more spurious (spiteful?) comments, and tried to provide context where necessary, all the while allowing that Who aficionados and those who have read my Moon biography may not need it. Grammar and spelling a mixture of English-English and American-English; how I often wish they were the same language!
The interview itself is for paid subscribers here at Wordsmith. I would like to thank and welcome those who came on board in that capacity over the past week, evidently evidently drawn by the stories in The Ox interview Part 1. Truly, it’s thanks to your backing that I don’t feel so bad about working on that Part 1 on the red-eye plane coming over to England last Friday night so as to post it on time, or on Part 2 here in an Airbnb on my first Friday night in London in a long time, for the same reason!
Certainly, it’s been a week here in the UK, one that included seeing The Who in concert at the Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday night, as part of the Teenage Cancer Trust annual concert series that Roger Daltrey has been heading up for so many years, and from the center of the third row no less. If it’s the last time I ever see the group, it was an incredible position to be in, and I am more than content about that. I am also content with having done my own part to tell the group’s story via the vehicle that was the Keith Moon biography, Dear Boy in the UK, Moon in certain other places. That book has been translated into multiple languages, published in multiple editions, and continues to sell and draw new readers even after a quarter-century, just as The Who’s best music continues to resonate down the ages.
The third and final part of our interview – because it turns out we filled three tapes, not two, and this one alone is too long for an e-mail so yes, please do open up your browser and enjoy at leisure – will follow soon, though most likely not next week itself. But in the meantime, for those of you who may be new here, I’ll end the intro with links to some of the other Moon-related interviews and stories from my 36 weeks on Substack. Those on the paid plan have instant access to all of these archives. Those of you still unsure about biting that bullet (and I understand, we can’t all support everyone), it’s possible Substack will have auto-generated a special offer or trial period or free article for you. If so, I hope you accept; there’s a wealth of material has accumulated here, and that includes the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with
. Take the opportunity to check some of it out, and hopefully to make that permanent commitment. I am enjoying what I am doing here, and all the more so when readers confirm that it has value.“Money would blow away in the wind from Keith.”
And with that, then “below the fold” we journey back to that scorching hot day in ’96, my friend Matt Kent and myself now duly sated by a glass of water, ready to indulge The Ox as I start the second tape by asking him about Keith’s own country pile, the decidedly futuristic pyramid-like glass house that had been Tara, in the Surrey stockbroker belt town of Chertsey.
